Reborn ac-4

by F. Paul Wilson

  Mr. Veilleur shook his head. "No. That's not how the game is played."

  "Game?" Suddenly she was furious with him. Carol's husband was dead and she was going to have to perform an abortion on her niece and he had the nerve— "How can you call this a game?"

  "I don't think of it as a game, but I have a feeling they do."

  "They?"

  "The powers that are playing with us. I think… I don't know for sure, but after all these years I've come to the conclusion that we're some sort of prize in a contest between two incomprehensibly huge opposing powers. Not the big prize. Maybe just a side bet. Nothing of any great value, just something one side wants simply because the other side seems interested and may find useful someday."

  Grace wanted to block her ears against this heresy.

  "But God, Satan—"

  "Call them whatever you wish. The side we might call Good doesn't really give a damn about us. It merely wishes to oppose the other side. But the other side is truly harmful. It feeds on fear and hate and violence. But it doesn't cause them, for forcing you to do evil gains it nothing. The evil must rise from within."

  "Because we're evil due to Original Sin."

  "I've never understood why people buy that Original Sin business. It's just the Church's way of making you feel guilty from day one. It means it's a sin to be born—patently ridiculous. No, we're not evil. But we have a huge capacity for evil."

  Grace didn't want to hear, but she couldn't help listening. And as she listened, she sensed the sincerity behind his words.

  "And so its agent here—the Presence I mentioned the other day—will strive to make it easier for you to defile yourselves and each other. He will clear the path for all that is base within you to come to the fore, facilitate the actions that destroy the bonds of love and trust and family and simple decency that enrich your lives and feelings for each other. And once each and every one of you is divided from each and every other one, when you all have become mentally, physically, and emotionally brutalized islands of despair, when you have each descended into your own private hell, then he will merge you all into one hell on earth."

  "But how bad—?"

  "A gentle skim of the history of mankind, even the sanitized accounts preserved in commonly used texts, can give you some idea of man's capacity for what is called 'inhumanity.' That only scratches the surface of what will come. The horrors of daily life will make the Nazi death camps seem like a vacation resort."

  Grace closed her eyes in an attempt to envision the future he spoke of, but her imagination failed her. And then suddenly she saw it. The whole apocalyptic vista appeared in her mind—she felt it, touched it, tasted the misery and depravity that lay ahead. She cried out and opened her eyes.

  Mr. Veilleur was staring at her, nodding grimly.

  "And you won't help us stop him?" she cried.

  "No. I'm old. And I've had enough of fighting. I have only a few years left. All I want is to live them out in peace. I can't add to your effort. Only you can do what needs to be done. But I wish you luck today. And don't let anything frighten you off."

  "Frighten… ?"

  "Yes. You may see things. You may find yourself confronted with your worst fears, your deepest guilts. Ignore them. They can't harm you. Just do what you've been chosen to do."

  He accompanied her down to the street where the Chosen waited by their cars. He shook hands with her, then turned and began walking uptown.

  As she got into Martin's car to head for Monroe—with a planned stop at a hardware store along the way—Grace watched the older man's retreating figure and could not shake the feeling that she would never see him again.

  4

  Carol had hoped to hide it from him, but it didn't work. Bill looked up from where he had spread a blanket on the lawn and leapt to his feet.

  "Carol? What's wrong?"

  Sobbing, she told him about the phone call.

  "Damn!" he said. "What is wrong with those people?"

  "I don't know! They frighten me!"

  "You've got to get the police in on this. Have them watch the house."

  "I think you're right. I'll call them after lunch." She looked down at the blanket. "I thought we were going to eat in the gazebo."

  "It's warmer out here in the sun."

  She dropped to her knees on the blanket and stared at the tuna-fish sandwiches. What little appetite she had before the call was completely gone now.

  "How'd they learn I was pregnant? I found out less than two days ago."

  Bill seated himself across from her. He didn't seem much interested in eating, either.

  "It means they've been watching you."

  Carol glanced around at the willows, the house, the empty Sound. Watched! It gave her the creeps. And it made her suddenly glad that Jonah Stevens would be around.

  "Aren't they ever going to leave me alone?"

  "Eventually, yes. Once all this publicity dies down, they'll find some other ripe target for their paranoia. Until then, maybe you should reconsider Emma's offer to put you up with them. Or maybe you could stay with my folks. They'd love to have you."

  "No. This is the only home I have now. I'm staying here."

  She was angry that she should even have to consider hiding from these kooks. But she worried about the baby. Could they really want to hurt her baby?

  Jim's baby.

  "The voice on the phone—I think it was a woman—said I'm carrying the Antichrist."

  Bill stared at her. "And you believe that?"

  "Well, no, but—"

  "No buts, Carol. Either you believe you're carrying a perfectly normal human baby or you don't. Normal baby or supernatural monster—I don't see much middle ground here."

  "But Jim's being a clone—"

  "Not that again!"

  "Well, it bothers me, what they said. What if they're right? What if a clone really isn't a new human being? I mean, it's really just an outgrowth of cells from an already existing human being. Can it have a soul?"

  She watched with dismay as Bill's assured expression faltered.

  "How can I answer that, Carol? In the two-thousand-year history of the Church, the question has never arisen."

  "Then you don't know!"

  "I can tell you this much: Jim was a man, a human, an individual. He had a right to a soul. I believe he had one."

  "But you're not sure!"

  "Of course I'm not sure," he said gently. "That's what faith is all about. It's believing when you can't be sure."

  She thought of the awful dreams she had been having, the consummate evil depicted within them. Were those dreams originating in her womb and filtering up to her subconscious? What if they were more than fantasies? What if they were memories'!

  "But what if what you believe is wrong? What if Jim had no soul and Satan used him as a passage into… into me!"

  She was losing it. She could feel all control slipping away. Then Bill reached over and squeezed her hand.

  "I told you about Satan. He's a fiction. So is the rest of this mumbo jumbo. This isn't a horror story, Carol. This is real life. Antichrists get born in works of fiction, not in Monroe, Long Island."

  She felt the panic flow out of her. She was acting silly. But right then, surfacing in the midst of the flood of relief, came a fleeting burst of hatred for Bill and for the comfort he had brought her. Why?

  She forced a laugh. "Maybe I should stop thinking so much."

  Bill smiled and held out the platter of sandwiches to her.

  "Maybe you should."

  She took one. She felt so much better now. Maybe she could get something down.

  5

  Time to go.

  Lunch, what little they'd eaten, was over. Bill looked at his watch and reluctantly decided that he had better be hitting the road soon. It had been a hectic weekend, a decided change of pace from the routine of St. F.'s. He knew he couldn't survive this kind of stress too often. Who could? But he realized that all the stresses Carol had put him
through since his arrival on Friday afternoon were but a sampling of the pressure weighing upon her hour after hour, day after day. Bad enough that Jim had died a week ago today, but then to learn that she was carrying his baby, and now to have some paranoid lamebrain call and tell her she's carrying the Antichrist!

  The limitless possibilities for perversity in daily life never failed to astound him.

  Time to go.

  Bill looked at Carol sitting across the blanket and felt as if he were looking through her sundress. He kept seeing her naked body as she had stood before him on Friday afternoon. Her breasts with their erect nipples, her fuzzy pubic triangle…

  Time to go.

  It was torture being near her like this. And he was ashamed of the regret he felt for not giving into her on Friday. He tried to push it away, walk on, and leave it behind, but it kept at his heels, nagging at him, tugging on his sleeve.

  To his dismay he realized he loved her, had always loved her, but had submerged the feeling in a well of daily prayer and busy work and ritual. Now the old feelings had bobbed to the surface and lay floating between them like a murdered corpse.

  If he didn't get out of here soon…

  "Time to go," he said.

  Carol nodded resignedly. "I guess so. Thanks for staying."

  She reached out and grasped both his hands, her touch sending an unwelcome thrill through him. "Thanks for everything this weekend. If you hadn't been there Friday, I might have died."

  "If I hadn't been there, maybe you wouldn't have—" He stopped, unable to speak of it. "Maybe nothing would have happened."

  She released his hands. "Yes. Maybe."

  They got up, Carol taking the sandwich platter and he taking the blanket. As he turned to shake it out downwind he heard her cry out.

  "Bill! Look!"

  He turned and saw her pointing to a patch of brown grass at her feet.

  "What's wrong?"

  "That grass! That's where I was sitting! And now it's dead, just like the grass over Jim's grave!"

  "Easy, Carol—"

  "Bill, something's wrong, I know it! Something's terribly wrong!"

  "Come on, will you? It's not even spring yet! Some big stray dog probably emptied his bladder there this winter and it hasn't had a chance to turn green again!"

  "That's right where I was sitting!" she said. "Did you see it there before you put the blanket down? Did you?"

  Seeing the panic in her eyes, he decided to lie.

  "Now that you mention it, yes. I do remember seeing a brown patch there."

  The relief on her face made the lie worthwhile. Actually he didn't remember seeing any dead grass there before. But of course, he hadn't been looking for it.

  "Let's just do a little experiment, shall we?" he said. "Follow me."

  Earlier, while waiting for Carol to come out, he had wandered around the backyard and had noticed a row of geraniums blooming in the greenhouse on the south side of the mansion. He led her now to the steamy glass enclosure. The pungent odor of the red-orange blossoms filled the room.

  "Here," he said, pointing out a specimen with particularly long stems. "Wrap your fingers around one of those and hold it for a moment without squeezing."

  "Why?"

  "Because I want to prove to you that neither grass nor flowers nor anything else dies because of you or Jim or your baby."

  Glancing at him uncertainly, she knelt and did as he had told her. Bill sent up a silent prayer that this moment would pass free from another example of life's limitless possible perversities.

  If it dies, we've got big trouble, he thought lightly.

  Carol let the stem go after a good half minute's grip and leaned away from it, as if the blossom might suddenly explode.

  "See?" Bill said, hoping his own relief didn't show as the bright flower and its stem remained healthy, green, and unwilted. "You're letting your imagination run away with you. You're buying the paranoid delusions of those demented fanatics."

  She smiled brightly and for a moment it looked as if she might hug him, but she didn't.

  "You're right! It's all bullshit!" She laughed and slapped a hand over her mouth. "Oops! Sorry, Father!"

  "Your penance for that is three Hail Marys and a good Act of Contrition, young lady!" he said in his father-confessor voice, wishing she had hugged him.

  Oh, yes. It's way past time to go.

  6

  Brother Robert sat stiffly in the front seat of Martin's car. His thoughts churned chaotically as the caravan of three vehicles rolled along the Long Island Expressway.

  In a way he was disappointed. He had taken it for granted that he would be the one to lead the faithful in this divine mandate, that he would carry the fiery sword of the Lord into battle against the Antichrist. But he had been passed over. Grace had been selected.

  Still, he had not been passed over completely. Gently rubbing the scabs of the healing Stigmata on his palms, he thanked the Spirit for touching him in such an intimate manner.

  To be honest with himself, he had to admit that he was somewhat relieved that the responsibility had been shifted from his shoulders. He was still nominally in charge by reason of his ordination, but it was no longer up to him alone to strike that final blow against Satan. It had been a weighty burden. Now that it had been partially lifted, he felt lightheaded, almost giddy.

  What a strange Armageddon this would be. What a motley, ragtag Army of the Lord they made, these everyday people. And their fiery swords: some small surgical instruments!

  Where was the majesty, the grandeur of this great battle between good and evil? Who ever would have imagined that the fate of the world would be determined in a small town in this quiet corner of Long Island? It didn't seem right. It was too ordinary, too mundane.

  Yet he could deny neither the miracle of the Stigmata nor the message from deep within him: They were about to confront a monstrous evil. If they succeeded in uprooting it before it established itself, the world would be spared enormous pain.

  Brother Robert had wanted to do that uprooting. But he did not have the requisite skills for that particular task. Grace did. He consoled himself with the thought that it was for that reason and not for any doubt about the strength of his faith that he had been passed over by the Lord. Personal considerations were of no consequence here. The task was all-important.

  And soon it would be done. Soon the Antichrist would be sent careening back to hell, and Brother Robert would be headed back to his beloved cell in the monastery at Aiguebelle.

  7

  In the backseat Grace rested her arm on the leather, felt-lined box of surgical steel instruments at her side. She had auto-claved them on her shift last night at Lenox Hill, and now they were perfectly sterile. In her lap she cradled the jar of chloroform she had taken from the hospital. She also had antiseptic solution and supplies of antibiotic capsules and codeine tablets she would give Carol to take after the procedure was completed.

  She couldn't help having second thoughts about this. The Stigmata still marked her, the Spirit still filled her, and she would not be turned from her mission… but she wished there were some other way. If only Carol had miscarried completely a couple of days ago, none of this would be necessary. Grace knew that for the rest of this earthly life she would pay for what was about to happen here. She just prayed it would be balanced by her reward in the next.

  Oh, Lord, let this cup passeth from me.

  But the cup could not be passed, she knew, because there was no one to pass it to.

  Carol… her brother's only daughter. In the span between Henry and Ellen's death and Carol's marriage to Jim, the girl had become almost a daughter to Grace. She had sent her off to college in the morning and had stayed up and worried when she was out late on Saturday nights. She had given her away at her wedding.

  Nothing was going to happen to Carol, only to the blasphemy she carried. But Carol would never understand, never forgive her, and that was the hardest part. Yet Grace was willing to sacr
ifice her niece's love for her God, for the safety of humankind.

  And sometime after the Antichrist was eliminated—Grace was not sure when—the police would find her and arrest her, as they would most of those with her. None of them cared. They had been marked for glory. They were doing what had to be done. It was the Lord's work, and after it was done, they would put themselves in His hands.

  They were filled, all of them, with holy purpose. Eight men and five women, including Grace, all chosen by the Spirit, all ready to die for their God. She needed the men along for their strength in case they had to subdue anyone who might be protecting Carol. And she needed the women to help her with Carol. It would not be right to expose her niece's body to strange men, even if those men were filled with the Spirit. So the women would hold Carol while the men made sure Grace could perform her task undisturbed.

  She closed her eyes. This was her salvation. She could feel it. By this one act she would undo all the sins of her previous similar acts. The symmetry of it was perfect.

  But of course, why wouldn't it be? Its origin was divine.

  8

  Carol watched Bill drive the old station wagon through the gate and turn out of sight. Suddenly she felt very alone. She walked back in the house to be with Emma—I must be really desperate!—and tried to help her clean up the kitchen. But Emma shooed her away, telling her to follow doctor's orders and stay off her feet.

  Carol tried. She turned on the TV and spun the dial: old movies, G.E. College Bowl, hockey, and pro basketball. She picked up two books and put them down again. She felt restless. She had been cooped up in a tiny hospital room for the past two days. She didn't want just to sit and do nothing, because if she did, she'd start thinking of Jim and about what had happened to him and how she would never see him again…

  She wandered into the greenhouse to see if she could busy herself with the plants. It was hot and dry under the glass. Almost everything here needed water. That was what she could do: water the plants.

  She was searching for a watering can when she spotted the dead geranium.